1. Technical Field
The invention relates to remote control of a computer system.
More specifically, the invention relates to frame-by-frame encoding of a desktop computer display, transmitting the encoded view to a thin client device, decoding the stream on the thin client device, and translating inputs made on the thin client device for controlling the remote desktop.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In computing, there are techniques for sharing a view of a desktop computer. Virtual Network Computing (“VNC”) is a graphical desktop sharing system that uses a remote frame buffer (“RFB”) protocol over wired or wireless network connections to share a view of the desktop to other devices. The client devices decode the video data and display the view of the desktop.
VNC systems can sometimes be adequate for resource light applications such as remote troubleshooting and collaborative word-processing; however, known VNC solutions suffer a number of major drawbacks.
First, many modern applications demand low latency times between user input and the corresponding output, as well as with video rendering, in general. For example, participants in a videoconferencing session are often frustrated by delays between speech and output between the participants of a conversation. This can lead to miscommunication. Also, in the world of online gaming, latency leads to unacceptable delays between input and action that disadvantage players having high latency.
Next, traditional VNC system approaches assumed that the desktop computer and the client system shared a common system for providing input. For example, in a common remote computing scenario, a traveling business person logs into his work computer from a remote location, i.e. a hotel. Traditional VNC systems assumed that the work computer and the hotel computer were each equipped with a keyboard and a mouse or other pointing device. This paradigm has worked in the past, but an expansion of alternative inputting methods render traditional VNC systems obsolete.